


cut your own brakes

by kiiouex



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Drinking, Driving, Drug Mentions, Kavinsky is a content warning, M/M, POV Second Person, Terrible Road Safety
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-10
Updated: 2016-02-10
Packaged: 2018-05-19 12:55:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,767
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5968072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kiiouex/pseuds/kiiouex
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Distance closes fast when you don’t care about the consequences, and you <i>don’t</i>, and you didn’t tell Lynch that you’ve never lost a single game of chicken but he’s a smart fucker. He’ll figure it out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	cut your own brakes

**Author's Note:**

> I love these awful boys _so much._
> 
> Thanks to [telekinesiskid](http://archiveofourown.org/users/telekinesiskid) who very wisely advised me to let it sit for a day and re-edit because wow there was some janky stuff in here until she helped me smooth it out.

Sometimes, Lynch comes to your parties. Like it’s no big deal. It’ll be smoke and bass and a crowd and then _him_ , capturing your attention like there’s nothing exploding three feet to your left. Tonight he stands out by his stillness, sitting in his BMW, head back on the headrest, eyes lidded but not closed, your party a chaos that he allows to surge around him. You like to guess where the appeal lies – the noise, the mess, the freedom, everything about himself he has to temper. That’s what draws the rest of the moths to your inferno.

Across the fairground, someone screams, glass splinters, and one of your floodlights crackles out. Lynch doesn’t twitch. You can’t tell through the windscreen, through the distance and the night and your own shades, but you think he’s looking at you.

You start towards him in lazy strides, through the throng of people crowding your court, snagging a bottle from the first hand that doesn’t fight you for it. Lynch is probably going to act like he’s not watching, but he is, and you’re alive with it, every overblown wire of your brain bouncing that fact around. He’s here for your kind of good time, and you aim to please.

His driver’s side window is down, and you have taken much smaller gestures as invitation, you have taken outright refusal as invitation, and you yank his door straight open so you don’t have to waste your time craning your neck down at him. “Nice night, Lynch,” you say, taking a swig and discovering that whatever you grabbed tastes like battery acid and smells like hair on fire. You swallow down the burn, and grin at him. “Girlfriend know you’re out this late?”

 “Gansey’s busy,” he says, and he always says Dick’s name so pointedly after you’ve refused to use it. If it wasn’t such a sore point, you’d stop needling it. “Just came to see how shit your taste in music is.”

The bass is a muddy drone in the background, a heartbeat to die by. “And?”

“Sounds like someone kicked in the speakers.” They probably did, but you’d have thought Lynch would have valued volume over quality. Too bad for him if he doesn’t. You toss your bottle away with a hard snap of your wrist, and expect to hear it shatter. You get someone crying out in pain instead, and it’s not as sharp a sound but it’ll do.

“Let me get you something,” you tell him, gracious host that you are. “You want something to take you out of your head, help you escape all this shit and Mrs Lynch?”

He doesn’t reply, just inches his head away from you. You’d make a ‘trouble in paradise’ joke, but you did one last time you managed to goad him into a race. He smacked you hard enough for it that you bet he remembers. You’d hate to get stale on him.

Instead, your eyes fall to his leather bracelets, too tough to be real fodder for fag jokes, though you’ve absolutely tried. “Are those yours, or the ones I gave you?” you ask him, and you can see him stiffen just a fraction. “Can you even tell the difference?”

He looks back at you at last, eyes dull and unamused. He’s here because he’s having a bad night, he’s here because he wants a distraction, he’s here to see what you can provide. “The ones you gave me don’t smell right,” he says.

It’s practically offensive, the idea that you made something wrong. Especially when you thought you knew - the tang of his leather always hung in your nose for the second between the impact of his fist and the rush your blood tinting every scent copper. Maybe your memory’s not on point for your own head wounds. Maybe he just smells different for that moment, adrenaline, pheromones, fight or fuck mixed up in a rush that always slams you square in the face.

It doesn’t matter. The bracelets aren’t a failure since they still _worked_ , the look on his face such a welcome reward for the pile of leather scraps stacked up in one of your cars. You want to know if he figured it out right then, or only after he’d gotten to take them home and roll them between his fingers, feel them worn and familiar and unmistakeable.

You’ve still got the shades he gave you tucked in one of your gloveboxes, worthless but for what they represent, and what they represent is Ronan Fucking Lynch playing your game.

You should have put that as his name on all those licences. There’s always next time.

“You’re still hanging around,” he tells you, like it’s an obligation to remind you you’re unwelcome. It doesn’t make a difference. You lean your weight on the open door, not heavy enough to make it swing, and            you want to ask him how many nights he spent dreaming about you before he slid the shades off your face. He doesn’t look in the mood. “How’s anyone meant to enjoy this fucking party with you leering at them?”

“You’re here to enjoy the party?” you ask, and he shrugs with one shoulder, as committal as he gets. “We’re the same kind of animal, Lynch. How much longer are you going to pretend like you’re not?”

“For as long as I’m not,” he tells you, still dry, and it’s starting to piss you off. If he was going to restrain himself he could have stayed at home with the other Aglionby girls, but he came to _your_ party and you’re damned if you’re going to let him kill the mood.

You brace your forearms against the frame and lean into the car, getting up in his space and watching for the minute reactions he thinks he’s good at hiding. He should know by now that you’re a fucking bloodhound when it comes to him, that you can see the twitch of his fists tightening as his pulse quickens. You know he hasn’t decided what he wants to do with you, just that it has to be rough, and you are absolutely game. “Want to play chicken?”

He lets his head loll back against the seat, a laudable farce of disinterest. The advantage is still yours, if he hasn’t realised how many months you had your eye on him before you made your play. All those nights you spent ripping his bracelets off with your teeth, how hungry it’s made you for the real thing. “Gay chicken? I’ll win. We’ll wind up with two kids and a mortgage.”

Oh, you’d love to take him up on that – not the house but the honeymoon, some cheap hotel in Vegas – but you’ve got plans for tonight, have had plans since you first caught sight of his car gleaming under your artificial lights. “For real, Lynch, let’s you and me get into a fucking crash.”

One of his hands traces the curve of the steering wheel, like his car isn’t disposable, and he tells you, “You can wreck your own fucking car, but Gansey can’t drive for shit and I’m not spending the rest of the year carpooling with him.”

“So use one of mine.” You can’t help but smirk at the way his eyes flicker to you, because you can offer something as valuable as a car for fifteen seconds of throwaway stupidity, because that’s what real power looks like, the wealth they keep accusing Dick-Three of flaunting. Your grin broadens when you remember that one of Third’s dogs still _bikes_. Shame he’s not here to be righteously outraged by the excess.

The offer’s enough to get Lynch out of his seat, standing in front of you, on the verge of making a very fun mistake, an edge he always lets you shove him over. He’s still acting like there’s a choice to be made, but he’s on his feet in front of you and he’s never been smart enough to just tune you out and walk away.

Lynch’s attention strays out to the strip as the cheers reach a crescendo, suddenly drowning out the bass. You know the crash is coming, so you don’t have to flinch. Sparks flash across your lenses, and behind you someone howls, two cars becoming one pile of scrap.

“Is the point to crash?” he asks, as the sound of human misery is taken over by a hazy bassline. He sounds like Gansey. You wish he’d just fucking take something and let loose. You bet that Ronan Lynch wouldn’t unwind so much as unravel and you want the chance to watch.

“The point,” you tell him, “is to not be a pussy.”

He looks at you, boringly sober. “I’ll pass.”

He makes like he’s going to get back into his car, and you know what’ll happen if he does, it’ll be back to him staring at you out of a passenger window like a wretched little lapdog. It could be weeks before he feels like coming back here for you, and you don’t feel like waiting. “Are you saying no because Dick wouldn’t want you to?”

It works. You don’t know what the fuck Gansey did to drive Ronan to you, but Lynch’s hand clenches around the doorframe and then he’s tearing away, stalking off to the strip, and you laugh, deep and triumphant. You follow, watching rips of his tattoo threaded through his skin and how they tug with every angry shift of his shoulder blades. He looks at place among the casual fury of the fairground, looks like he belongs, looks like yours.

He picks out a Mustang from one of the dozen cars you’ve still got laying around, and it looks like it suits him. Your boys clear the strip, smouldering remnants of the last clash rolled ingloriously out of the way, one spot of scorched earth their last testament. You can’t deny the thrill that goes through you when you climb into a Mitsubishi, your Mitsubishi, and make the engine roar a challenge down the line to Lynch.

He revs back. Your favourite kind of foreplay, and you have never been so interested in being awake as you are right now. It’s so rare for reality to present something better than your dreams, but Ronan Lynch making one of your cars thunder for you is an unimaginable treasure.

You think you might be playing gay chicken anyway.

Someone throws a Molotov and it arcs overhead, a glorious stream of fire against the sky, until it crashes and flares not a meter off the strip. “Three,” someone shouts for you, “Two! One!”

You lick your lips, and try to read Lynch’s face through half a mile of midnight and black glass. You’d like to think he’s playing because he wants to do this _with_ you and not out of just self-destructive spite, but it doesn’t fucking matter. He’s still _here_.

Your party screams, “Go!” and you go, car hurtling down the strip to Lynch, a metal chariot that’s both in your control and so far out of it that it makes you laugh. Distance closes fast when you don’t care about the consequences, and you _don’t_ , and you didn’t tell Lynch that you’ve never lost a single game of chicken but he’s a smart fucker. He’ll figure it out.

He’s not a disappointment. He flattens his accelerator too, roaring up to meet you, fearless and furious and everything you’d hoped. The space between you narrows until reaction time is measured in the kinds of numbers the human brain is very bad at, and neither of you flinch. You take your hands off the steering wheel.

There is a single millisecond when you think Lynch must be doing the same, that he’s your match even in this, that you are going to be proven so right about him in your very last moment on this fucking earth. That Ronan Lynch is going to wipe you both the fuck out and be the one thing to have never bored you.

He swerves, hard. You smash in his corner headlight, but the Mustang takes the impact well enough. The airbag fires and you know Lynch is going to walk away rattled but unscathed.

Part of you is bitterly disappointed.

The rest is _awake_ in the way you usually engineer yourself to avoid, your own mortality lighting you up better than chemicals and you holler out your delight, a wild, uninhibited call that your court echoes back for you. The Mitsubishi’s grille is warped around the Mustang, the impact might have given you whiplash, and you feel like a fucking god.

It takes you a moment to come down and settle your heart back into your skin. You look to Lynch, to see the exhilaration mirrored back at you from his face, but the seat’s empty, door open, Lynch’s back retreating down the strip in long, tense strides.

Your passion fades into an angry hiss, and you kick your door open, slamming it into someone coming at you with a victory drink. “Lynch!” you shout, running to catch up. He glares fiercely over his shoulder, and you see there is no part of him that isn’t trying to get away. You snag his arm, and your hand is smacked away in an instant. “ _Lynch_.”

“I can’t fucking do this,” he snarls, rounding on you. There’s a wild edge to his expression, but not the triumphant kind, just the knowledge of how close to the edge you’d really led him. One second longer and he’d never have to worry about Gansey again.   

“You just _did_ ,” you snap back. You can’t believe he’s trying to deny what you _know_ he must have felt in all those seconds along the strip. “Don’t pretend you’re not built for this, Lynch, you are from the same fucking stock as me.”

“I am _not_ ,” he hisses. “You can play your stupid games with your throwaway friends, but I am going back to see people who _matter_.”

It doesn’t sound like it’s his word, but you’re not going to forgive it anyway. Your fist snaps up at his nose, but without a gun or a knife then you aren’t much of a match for a trained boxer. Ronan knows. Your punch glances off him, all furious energy with nothing backing it up. He still slams a fist into your gut in punctual retaliation. When all your gut has in it is a roiling cocktail that works out to jet fuel, it only takes one to knock you to your knees and get you retching. A sick mix of gunk spatters onto the ground beneath you, and you sag, trying to will yourself back onto your feet as you hear Ronan leaving.

You scramble up after him, shades askew and hideously uncool, but you’re too late. The BMW’s pulling out of the lot, taking him back home to say his prayers or make amends and pretend like he’s better than you. You hurtle a rock at his rear window, but only clip the bumper, and Proko trails up with something gunpowdered a day too late.

You just need him to get the fuck over himself long enough to learn what’s really on offer. You want to teach him what _he_ can do, tell him about how you learned to perfect pills and Prokopenkos in a ruthlessly efficient loop, to show him your hundred cars and see what he comes up with on his own. You want him to know exactly what he could have if he’d just leave Her Royal Highness Gansey the Third behind.

If he’s happy being Gansey’s mutt, then he thinks you’re lower than a dog. You might as well act it. If he gives a shit about that car then you’re going to stuff it full of fireworks and offer him a new one, you’ll replace his Gansey with one of your making, you’ll make _him_ , just for you to tear apart as punishment for the original.

Proko tosses his combustible away too late, and you hear his howl buried under a new wave of adrenaline from the strip. You’re sick of the party. The next screeching collision of metal is far less satisfying, and you drift away, leave your mob of idiots to burn themselves out. No point chasing Lynch for a couple of days. You’re due to pick up another batch of little green pills, dream up some new distractions, try to find something in your head that Lynch will really like.

Shame you’re not enough on your own to tempt him.


End file.
